


Sound and Silence

by thesearchforbluejello



Series: Rogue Oneshots [6]
Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Angst, Draven is doing his best, F/M, Rebelcaptain Week, this idea started out as fluff if you can believe that
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-16
Updated: 2018-07-16
Packaged: 2019-06-11 05:50:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,549
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15308817
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thesearchforbluejello/pseuds/thesearchforbluejello
Summary: The Alliance is in a fragile place, and sacrifices must be made for the sake of the war.





	Sound and Silence

**Author's Note:**

> I started out without being able to figure out a way to work "space" in and then ended up with a lot of ways, so there's a lot of literal and metaphorical takes on "space" here. Unbeta'ed because I should be asleep already and am not, and this is already a day behind schedule.

He thinks he hears his name.

It's a distant, distorted, half-suffocated sound, and for a moment he assumes he must have imagined it.

He's weightless and comfortably disoriented, floating in liminality. There's no sound in space, he thinks belatedly, so it must just be a trick of his imagination. If he opens his eyes he sees hazy pinpricks of light through the darkness, little stars shining in the night, but he shuts his eyes again because they're too bright.

He thinks he hears his name, again, the saddest song he's ever heard. 

He's been told stories of space, stories where those who have been brave-- or stupid-- enough to spacewalk have heard music out there in the darkness. He thinks it must sound something like this. Was he stupid enough to go for a spacewalk? He can't quite remember. 

He opens his eyes again when he feels the pull of gravity; the stars are moving, dragging downwards and away, but a sudden light blinds him and he shuts his eyes tight. He hears his name, again, coming from where that silence had been before. 

He blinks away sunspots, looking up at Jyn. There's a jagged cut on her forehead, almost at her hairline, mottled with the dark shades of a bruise around it. Her hair is straggling free of the bun it had been in, framing her face smudged with soot and dirt. Her eyes are big and green and wet and she's the best thing he's ever seen. "You're beautiful," he says, all slurred and dazed; it's not what he meant to say, but he supposes it works just as well.

"So are you," she says, softly, like she means it, pushing his bacta-wet hair away from his eyes. There are lines of stress on her forehead, around her eyes, etched against her mouth. There's relief there too, and he can see it in the way she looks at him. He doesn't know what it means, but he's asleep before he can really think about it.

***

He wakes once just enough to see lights above him before he's asleep again.

The next time he wakes, he's groggy and the taste of bacta is still sticky in his mouth. The lights focus into some semblance of stillness above him and he looks around. He doesn't recognize the medbay, but even though his thoughts feel dim and foggy he knows they didn't flee Hoth on this ship. 

It's only when he moves to reach for a cup of water that he notices the weight on his left arm; it's Jyn, and he realizes belatedly that he should've known she'd be here. She's sound asleep, face pressed into the bed between his arm and his side. He tries to turn towards her and alleviate some of the stiffness in his back, but the motion rouses her. She blinks at him, squinting in the bright light of the med bay, the shadows beneath her eyes making the green of her eyes almost startling. 

Cassian settles on his side. He watches her silently for a moment before reaching out and tracing the pattern of freckles along her cheekbone with the pad of his thumb. She closes her eyes. He's so distracted by her freckles, the little specks that look like stars on the universe of her skin, that he doesn't notice her speaking to him. Her hair is down, soft and fine, hanging past her shoulders longer than he's seen it since he's known her. He reaches out to touch it, but hears her voice again.

He looks at her, green eyes and freckles like stars, and she says again, "Cass."

He says something to her then that makes her brow furrow. He blinks at her a moment before realizing that his response wasn't in Basic. He's already forgotten what he said, so instead he says, "What?"

"How are you feeling?" she says again. 

He has to muddle his way through thinking about how even words as banal as those sound so soft and round in her Core accent before he can answer her. "A little--" how is this said in Basic?-- "scrambled. Obviously."

Jyn nods. "They've drugged you pretty liberally."

"What happened?"

The stress lines etched in her face deepen. "The ship couldn't handle the stress. Hyperdrive went critical before we reached Haven."

"Blew up?"

"Part of it. We were lucky. Most everyone else died." Cassian frowns, trying to remember who'd been on the ship. Bodhi was with an X-wing squadron. Chirrut and Baze had been on another transport, the name of which is escaping him entirely.

"K?" he asks.

"Yeah, he's fine. He was in a section that vented atmo, but he can survive in space, remember?" she says drily. Cassian is too foggy to get the joke, but he lets it lie.

"And... Kes?" He thinks he vaguely remembers Kes being on the ship with them.

"He's fine too." Cassian nods. "You were hit by shrapnel when the hyperdrive blew," she says, holding a hand to her side. Cassian feels for a bandage there and resists the urge to pull it off. "I pulled you behind one of their airlocks and sealed it so we wouldn't suffocate. Was afraid you might bleed to death, though. But it didn't take them long to help us."

"You took it out?" he asks, gesturing to his side.

"No," she says, "of course not. I left it in."

It takes a moment for that to sink in. "Oh," he says. "Thanks." If she'd removed it, he could've bled to death. By leaving it in, she probably saved his life. "Where are we now?"

"On the Redemption." 

Cassian frowns. "You're hurt," he blurts out, belatedly, because he'd noticed earlier but the information had gotten lost in the haze of the drugs.

Jyn raises a hand as if to touch the cut on her forehead, now covered with a small patch of bacta, but stops just shy. "Yeah," she says. "Just a little cut. Concussion. Nothing major."

"You should go and get some sleep," he says. "They've given you quarters, right?"

She looks away and her fingers twitch in his. He knows she's either about to lie or tell a half-truth. "Mm. Not allowed to leave the medbay yet. Observation and all that."

"Why?" he prompts. 

She looks at him sidelong. "Well they were going to." He waits. "Then I threw up my breakfast before I could leave. But honestly, who wouldn't when the food's that bad."

Cassian frowns. While nausea can occur with even mild head injuries, he knows that Jyn's concussion must be more than mild if she's already been sick-- once that he knows of. He looks her over again with a more critical eye. She looks exhausted, pale and drawn. He scoots to the opposite side of the bed without even feeling the tightness of his injury and pulls the blankets back. "Come here," he says.

It's a testament to how terrible he knows she must feel that she curls against his side without so much as an argument, all pretense of being fine abandoned. She pulls the blankets over her face to protect her eyes from the bright lights. 

"Nothing major, hm?" he says.

"It would be less major if you weren't talking so loud," she says peevishly, words muffled by the blankets. It's an abrupt shift from the façade of just a few moments ago. Cassian chuckles. "I'd pinch you," she says, "but they've given you so many painkillers you probably wouldn't feel it."

"Did they give you anything?"

"For the headache? Yeah. Doesn't make me feel much better though. The room's still spinning even when my eyes are shut." Cassian settles more comfortably on his back, one arm around Jyn. "You should sleep," she says.

"So should you."

"We'll both sleep," she says.

***

Jyn wakes when the medbay is in its nightshift and the lights have been mercifully dimmed. She watches Cassian sleep for awhile, running her fingers through his hair. The smell of bacta on his skin has faded a bit in the past few hours, but it still lingers, a little organic, a little sour.

Her headache is roaring behind her eyes. The room is swimming a little less now that she's lying down, but the pseudo-motion is still stirring her nausea. 

She hears the squawking of an irritated medical droid and looks toward the entrance of the medical bay. Draven stands there, hands clasped behind his back, standing rail-straight and clearly issuing an order that the droid cannot comply with. It squawks again and Draven makes eye contact with her across the bay.

While she's lying in what's pretty obviously Cassian's bed and she's very obviously curled around him.

Fantastic.

Jyn may have one of the best concussions she's ever had, but it would take some serious trauma for her to not realize why Draven's here. There's always been an unofficial "if it doesn't come up, don't mention it" policy upheld with relationships among rebels, and it's never come up. High Command hears all the gossip, but elects to dismiss anything that isn't a direct threat. It's not like no one ever noticed she wasn't sleeping in the barracks, or that no one knew where she was, in fact, sleeping instead. Throwing herself boots-first off a cliff to save Cassian from drowning had definitely almost put the topic on the table in debriefing, but the fact that she'd saved the life of one of Draven's best operatives had been enough to quash the conversation.

There's been something in the wind, lately, though. More individual assignments, and not just for them. Bodhi being sent as part of a supply attachment for an X-wing squadron. Chirrut and Baze being utilized as diplomatic attachés. Jyn's always been clever, maybe even a little too clever for her own good. She can understand why they'd think splitting them up was a good idea. But that doesn't mean she won't fight it tooth and nail.

The droid squawks a bit more, frantic and rushed, and Draven leaves.

Jyn watches Cassian sleep a bit longer. Long eyelashes cast shadows beneath his eyes. His usual scruff has grown into an actual beard in the past few days since the evacuation from Hoth. As drugged as he is, he's sleeping so peacefully that he looks younger than Jyn's ever seen him. She wonders if this is how he'd look without the war, or if he'd be so entirely different that she wouldn't even recognize him.

She lays her head on his chest and listens to the sound of his heartbeat.

***

She can't avoid Draven the next afternoon. He argues his way past the droid and since she's technically been released, she has no choice but to speak with him. 

"I'm glad to see you're well," Draven says. "Both of you."

Behind where she stands, Cassian is still asleep. "Thank you," she says, and means it.

"I have new orders for you," he says.

Jyn's headache is more muted now, but his words bring a new nausea twisting in her gut. Basic doesn't distinguish between a single and plural "you," but Jyn knows intuitively that this is not plural. These orders are for her, not Cassian.

"You're to report to the Pathfinders as soon as you're declared fit for duty. You'll receive further orders from Sergeant Dameron when you arrive."

She lifts her chin. "What about my team?"

" _Captain Andor's _team has been variously reassigned."__

__Jyn wants to argue. She wants to scrabble for any reason she can find to keep them together._ _

__"Erso, you know this has to end. Things need to change for us to win. This is one of them. Each of you needs to be somewhere. As it happens, your places are not together. Not right now."_ _

__She wants to be able to tell Cassian that she tried to protect their team, to keep them together, to let them protect each other. She wants to argue, to yell, to resist. But there's a feeling, an instinct that blossoms in her chest that says that this isn't because of her and Cassian at all, that says that something important will come of this._ _

__"What you five--"_ _

__"Six," she interrupts._ _

__"-- did was nothing short of a miracle. Political and militaristic fallout aside. But each of you has a piece to play in this. I wish it was together. I do. But it's not."_ _

__Jyn's hands are tingling and her face feels numb._ _

__"You have your orders." Draven turns to leave, but pauses. "May the Force be with you, Erso."_ _

__When Draven's footsteps have faded into the corridor, Jyn sits down on the edge of Cassian's bed. The kyber crystal is hot in her hand. She doesn't remember picking it up._ _

__Behind her, Cassian stirs._ _

__She doesn't know how to tell him she's leaving._ _

__She doesn't know how to tell him she didn't resist._ _

__How can she explain something she doesn't understand herself?_ _

__***_ _

__She's cleared for duty the next morning. Cassian walks her to the hangar bay even though he's not supposed to be out of bed. She's silent beside him as they walk, hand fisted in her pocket._ _

__Cassian finds her other hand, twining her fingers with his._ _

__The hangar is loud with activity, sound bounding and echoing around the bright space._ _

__"I'm so sorry," Jyn finally chokes out._ _

__"It's okay."_ _

__"I should've--"_ _

__"Jyn," he says, holding her face in his hands, "it's okay. I trust you." Because he does. Against all rationality, against all his experience, against everything, he's trusted her right from the beginning. He doesn't know why she'd agreed so easily to Draven's orders. She's fought him before until he'd threatened with a court martial and expulsion from the rebellion altogether. But this time she'd admitted that she'd agreed without resistance. Cassian doesn't pretend to understand; he doesn't think Jyn herself knows. "I trust you," he says again._ _

__"I know," she says, and her voice breaks. He doesn't understand the sound._ _

__She reaches up, hands on the back of his neck, and pulls him down to her. She kisses him, unabashed, in front of everyone in the hangar bay. He holds her tight and closes his eyes, ignoring the sound around them._ _

__When she lets him go she looks at him, and she's brighter than any star he's ever seen._ _

__"I'll see you," she says. "Soon."_ _

__He nods, and she turns away without looking back. He knows it's so she doesn't lose her nerve. If there's one frightening thought that's ever occurred to him, it's that he could be the one thing that would possibly make Jyn Erso lose her nerve._ _

__He closes his eyes and listens to her footsteps until they disappear into the ship and the ramp shuts behind her._ _

__He's still standing there when the ship is gone and the hangar is loud around him. There's something burning in his chest, and at first he thinks it's fear. But when he looks down he sees it against his shirt; Jyn has left him her kyber crystal. He realizes, belatedly, that she must have clasped it around his neck when she was kissing him. He grips it in his hand so hard the edges groove his palm. It's almost hot enough to burn, but he doesn't let it go._ _

**Author's Note:**

> So that ending broke me to write, but the next and final oneshot will conclude everything. I didn't expect these to all turn out as an episodic little series, but I'm happy that they did.
> 
> Songs of the day are: Assassin by John Mayer and Angels in Everything by Blue October (I know, so much repetition of bands in my suggestions; so sue me.)


End file.
